understood.
"Fiddlesticks!" she exclaimed with a gesture of annoyance. "I sha'n't
care if you haven't two cents."

To this Loftus had no chance to reply. Annandale came lounging in.

"Do you know what I have done?" he collectively and blandly inquired.
"I told Skitt to buy me, at the opening, 1,000 Atchison and 1,000
Steel. Now I would like a quiet drink."

Loftus stood up. "I am going in the Park for a quiet smoke. But I
thought you had sworn off."

Annandale tugged at his cavalry mustache and laughed. "I haven't
touched a thing for nearly a year. But on a night like this, when the
whole town is mad, I think I might have a drop. Stop, dear boy, won't
you, and have one with me? No? Well--" And, accompanying Loftus to the
door, he whispered to him there, "My compliments to Miss Leroy."

"Don't forget, Royal," Fanny called after him, "that you dine with us
on the ninth."

CHAPTER III

THE GATES OF LIFE

In her sitting-room at the Arundel Marie sat. It was nearly midnight.
Hours before she had dined. Since then she had wandered from one room
to another, from one chair to another, wondering would Loftus come.
Sometimes he did. More often he did not. She never knew beforehand. It
was as it pleased him. Always the uncertainty irked her. But on this
evening it was particularly enervating. She had reached the gates of
her endurance. She could stand no more. She must pass through them,
pass or fall back, where she did not know, but somewhere, to some
plane, in which, though life forsook her, at least its degradation
would be foregone.

At first, in the old days, when he met her in the ex-first lady's den,
it had seemed to her that life would be incomplete without him. Then
it had seemed that with him it would be fulfilled to the tips.
Subsequently the long train of disenchantments had ensued. In Paris
he had pained her greatly. There, after a series of those things,
little in themselves, but which, when massed, become mountainous, she
had been forced to consider not her love for him but the nature of
such love as he had for her. In him there was a reticence which
perplexed, depths which she could not reach. At times his silence was
that of one to whom something has happened, who is suffering from some
constraint, from some pressure or from some long illness of which
traces remain. At others, it had exasperated her, it made her feel
like a piano, on which, a piece played, the cover is shut. She had
seemed to